Nexus One aka Google Phone: What does it really mean?

I remember there were rumors about Google Phone back in 2007 before the launch of Android. At that time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was part of Apple’s board of directors. This news had worried a lot to Apple that Eric Schmidt had cleared it to Apple that Google has no plan of launching a mobile phone in near future.

This year at Google I/O 2009 event Google had a special prize for all the attendees “A mobile phone running Android”‘. It was an HTC manufactured mobile which HTC launched later on. Google gave it away to all the attendees but it wasn’t the “Google phone”. On 12th of December 2009 Google gave away new phones to all of its employee as Christmas gift and called it “dog food”.

These new phones are also manufactured by HTC, running Android 2.1 and people are referring them as Nexus One. If these this phone is also manufactured by HTC then how come it is a “Google Phone”?

Here comes an interesting thing. Dogfood is a term used to indicate when a company gives away its products to employees for using/testing before they are actually launched. So does that mean that Nexus One is aka “Google Phone”  and Google will launch it next year? I don’t think so. Nexus One has new and improved hardware and running latest Android 2.1 on it. It could be mean that Google is just checking performance of their Android software package.

What if it is a real “Google phone”? It will not be fair with other Google partners who are manufacturing mobile phones for Android like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and bunch of other companies who are going to launch their Android enabled mobile phones next year. If there is already Google phone running Android who will buy other Android running phone?

To conclude this I could be right or I could be wrong but what I think Nexus One is not aka Google Phone. It’s an HTC phone and there are very less chances but Google might launch it as a joint venture with HTC. If it is a “Google Phone” then it’s just a mistake and It will never be an iPhone killer.